Welcome to the quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Brock Armstrong and I am the Get Fit Guy.

We all know that lifestyles, habits, and feelings can travel like viruses through our social connections,

both digital and analog, but now researchers have linked the same phenomenon

to fitness.

Do you want to be happier?

Well, yeah, of course you do. Who doesn't?

Well, perhaps you should try to surround yourself with happy friends.

A study that was published back in 2008 in the British Medical Journal called Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network, a longitudinal analysis over 20 years, says that happiness can go viral within your social network, like a good piano meme or maybe a hilarious cat video.

The researchers concluded that, and I quote,

People's happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides

further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.

In a similar way, if your friends are overweight, they can

apparently have an effect on you too. In a study called the spread of obesity in a large social

network over 32 years, it was concluded that, and I quote, network phenomenon appear to be relevant to the biologic and

behavioral trait of obesity, and obesity appears to spread through social ties. Now, if you find that

interesting, intriguing, or perhaps even terrifying, now researchers have identified that exercise can also

be contagious and spread via social media. In a paper called exercise contagion in a global social

network published in the nature of communications, researchers say that we show that exercise is socially contagious

and that its contagiousness varies with the relative activity of and gender relationships between

friends. To come to this conclusion, they looked at the running habits of about 1.1 million users around the world, who used

some variety of fitness tracker for five years. The runners collectively had about 3.4 million

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